Quantum DXi2500-D Cuts to the Chase as to What Mid-size Organizations Need in a Deduplication Appliance

"We need cheaper and simpler backups and recoveries for our remote and branch offices." That statement is repeated more often by mid-size companies as they seek solutions that take the pain and management overhead associated with backup and recovery out of their remote offices without breaking the budget or requiring heroic efforts to implement. This is exactly the type of scenario that the recently announced DXi2500-D appliance and version 3.0 of Quantum Vision™ Software from Quantum is designed to address.

Mid-size organizations are exactly that - mid-size - so the types of backup and recovery problems that they encounter are symptomatic of both small and large organizations. On the "small" end of the spectrum, mid-size companies only have a few IT staff that must support the entire data protection infrastructure in all offices from deploying the backup software to managing the recoveries. On the other end of the spectrum, the amount of data that they need to protect requires the skill sets, hardware and software that are more typically found in large organizations.

This is the gap that the DXi2500-D was designed to bridge. The DXi2500-D is sized with the capacity to easily handle sites with as little as a couple of hundred GBs of primary data to sites that have as much as 1 TB of data.  It offers the right core technology features that are most likely to meet the needs of short-handed, cost conscious mid-size organizations.  Using the DXi2500-D in conjunction with the Quantum Vision software, the can meet these needs in the following ways:

• A price point and feature set that makes disk-based data protection for remote and branch offices almost a no-brainer. Talk about features all you want, the first thing IT managers in midsize organizations want to know is, "What does it cost?" To cut the chase, the list price for the DXi2500-D is $12,500. This includes 1800 GB of disk, a NAS interface, deduplication, replication and Symantec's OpenStorage (OST) API software. That works out to about $7/GB raw or just under 35 cents/GB when the backup data is deduplicated assuming a 20:1 ratio. Further, because deduplication and replication are included with the DXi2500-D, organizations can frequently continue to use their existing WAN connections without needing to upgrade to send deduplicated data back to the home office.  
• Simple to deploy. IT staff at midsize organizations understand and know how to manage Ethernet networks. So by making the DXi2500-D a NAS-only appliance, Quantum makes the upfront installation and setup of these appliances simple and easy for organizations to accomplish as it integrates with their existing networks.
• Near 100% backup and recovery success rates. No one (including me) can guarantee that just by installing the DXi2500-D that an organization's backup and recovery will be 100% successful. But that said, I have never spoken to an organization where its success rates have dropped after it has implemented disk as a backup target. The almost universal response is that their success rates always improve and whatever problems remain after they implement disk are now much more manageable.
• Consolidated management across remote offices. Deploying DXi2500-Ds across branch offices brings these benefits to an organization, but they still require management that must be done with existing IT staff. Quantum's Vision software enables these organizations to centrally manage all their Quantum systems while at the same time providing detailed reports across time and sites on items like capacity utilization, deduplication ratios, system performance, system status and replication throughput.

Mid-size organizations are acutely aware of the pain associated with managing backups in their remote and branch offices but are also just as aware of the costs to fix their backup problems. The Quantum DXi2500-D now provides them a viable, cost-effective means to address their tactical backup and recovery problems while Quantum's Vision software addresses their ongoing management concerns by centralizing and consolidating the management of DXi-2500-D's and the data that they contain.
 
IT managers need fewer heroes and more solutions that work as reliable processes across their enterprise. The DXi2500-D coupled with Quantum Vision software solves these issues while laying a foundation that centrally and more easily manages their backup data and the appliances that host it going forward.